The counter door is chained shut and there is a red sign above it that says the way out.
I would like whoever installed both of those to sit with this painting for a while.
The tube is off. The only light is the exit sign, and it is doing what red light does in a dark interior, which is to describe the near edges of things and abandon everything else. The chain is what the picture is about. It runs through the two door handles and comes back on itself, and there is a padlock hanging at the bottom of the loop where the chain sags, and it is a good heavy chain, oiled at some point in its life, now dull.
Above it, the sign. Lit, red, legible from every seat in the room.
Nobody planned that. The door is chained because the counter is closed and there is a cash drawer somewhere behind it. The sign is lit because a code requires it to be lit whenever the building is occupied. Two entirely reasonable decisions made by two different departments, and where they meet is a locked door with the word for departure burning over it.
That is the whole business of this cycle in one panel. These rooms are not designed. They accumulate. Nobody sat down and drew the waiting room I have been painting for two months. It arrived one requirement at a time over thirty years, and the result has a coherence that no designer could have achieved on purpose, and the coherence is grim.
The seats are still there, still all eight, still in their line, facing the chained door. That was the detail that kept me in the room after hours. The chairs are pointed at the counter. They have no other orientation available to them, they are bolted to a common rail, and so at nine at night with the building shut they are still all facing the place where the service is not happening.
Furniture cannot stop waiting. I find that I take some comfort from it and I am aware of how that sounds.